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What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

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Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#61

Post by ahartmetz »

exitb wrote: post #44
marcosdumay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs. Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.

Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#62

Post by CamperBob2 »

exitb wrote: post #55
Telaneo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Yes. > Do you ever get confused navigating this website? No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.

Given it’s a website mostly for experienced computer people who, like you, don’t really need those visual cues, don’t you think adding them would be superfluous?

It's a website for experienced computer people, and I appreciate its minimalist aesthetic, but that doesn't mean there's not enormous room for improvement.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#63

Post by ahartmetz »

cubefox wrote: post #41

When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000. I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?

I was youngish at the time and thought Windows XP looked like clown vomit.

There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#65

Post by falcor84 »

EGreg wrote: post #30
xg15 wrote: post #21

> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of…

It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless…

I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#66

Post by chriswarbo »

Zak wrote: post #26

I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand: > Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do: feels like an idea from a time when many people were encoun…

> I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

I've been using computers since the early 90s; we got our first home computer when I was four; I've used many different operating systems.

As a professional Web developer, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what those slider widgets are supposed to mean. It's still very easy to get them wrong/confused (both as a user, and as the designer/dev making the form), e.g. when the affirmative state involves a negative setting, like "Mute" (does "on" mean "muted"; or does "on" refer to the audio, which I can use this to mute?)

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#67

Post by Melatonic »

petilon wrote: post #9
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Design language, like any language is metaphorical. The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX. The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.

Why are designers not understanding this these days? I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic. Somewhere in between is the right approach. The Ne…

That does look surprisingly good. And dated. For some reason my first thought was "why the hell is this reminding me of Carmen San Diego?!"

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#68

Post by thesdev »

ahartmetz wrote: post #63
cubefox wrote: post #41

When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000. I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?

I was youngish at the time and thought Windows XP looked like clown vomit. There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.

Windows XP was the first OS I ever used and still I switched to the classic UI because it looked just better in my opinion.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#69

Post by theodric »

I agree with these points, but I will still be disagreeable and take a more nuanced position: Windows NT 5.0 Interim Developer Release build 1796 (and some preceding builds) were peak Windows UI, because they had all the points in the article, plus a "show desktop" button in the lower right corner that you could blindly throw your mouse at-- a feature relegated to a Quick Launch action from the subsequent build, and only restored in Windows 7.

Check it out: https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.w...

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#70

Post by IronWolve »

I really liked when XP came out, and you could have both the clean 2000 look with advanced font rendering like cleartype. That was the perfect combo for desktop use.

I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin, then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop, now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.

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